Expect fireworks at this week’s Nato summit

This week is seminal for Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. Boris, in Watford, is hosting one of the most important Nato summits for years. Its significance is not because it marks the Alliance’s 70^th anniversary, but because of President Macron’s ‘disruptive’ and trenchant criticism of the Atlantic Alliance as close to ‘brain dead’, which has touched a nerve. The French President went on to reiterate his remarks at an Elysée press conference, with a visibly uncomfortable Nato Secretary General, three weeks later. Macron attacked the ‘strident and unacceptable disconnection’ from world threats during the last two Nato summits as being ‘uniquely devoted’, in his sarcastic words, ‘to finding solutions to how to lighten the United States’ financial costs’. All this, says Macron, while major strategic questions such as relations with Russia, Turkey and ‘who is the enemy?’ remain unanswered.

Expect fireworks at this summit, from Trump on the lack of ‘burden-sharing’ by Nato’s European partners, threats of a European army by Macron, anti-Macron taunts by Central and Eastern European states, all while fuel is added to the flames by Turkey’s President Erdogan, who provoked a Franco-Turkish diplomatic rift on Friday by claiming it was Macron who was ‘brain